Queenstown Writers Festival recently held a Writing Competition and Avni Batra submitted her work titled "After this, nothing was ever the same – A change" into the Rangatahi Category and was placed second. Avni migrated from India to NZ around the end of 2022 and says, “Nothing has ever been the same. This piece reflects on my journey of not only accepting this change but embracing it.” 

This year it was judged by Dominic Hoey who had this to say: “The writing in the competition overall was really strong. I wish I could have written that well when I was a teenager! A lot of creative approaches to the prompts, and some great imagery and character development in many of the stories. Congrats to the people who placed and also I want to awhi those who didn’t. Keep writing if that’s your passion. You never know where it’ll take you.” You can read Avni's work below:

After this, nothing was ever the same – A change

The white man with his hunting dogs disappeared into the green hills. The hills looked like the apotheosis of all hills, with the brightest green colour flooded with blobs of white from the herds of sheep, and there I was tired from my 24-hour journey from ‘home’. Don’t know if I can call that place home anymore knowing that it will only ever bring out the well-embedded guilt of being able to leave it once and come here but I don’t think I call New Zealand home either.

It doesn’t even feel reviving or exhilarating anymore standing in this open abyss of beautiful grounds, rather I feel worried thinking if I will ever be able to perceive this place beyond its beauty. After all, home is one place that doesn’t need to be pretty.

Four walls, the odious ringtone on my mum’s phone, and the smell of my brother’s sweaty socks that I have only ever been so familiar with don’t seem to provide much comfort like home either. Sometimes it’s the sound of an overplayed TikTok that provides much scope for the imagination or the one of a tolerable podcast that plays in the background of my sombre bedroom and saves me from my desolation, creating a half-good escape that honestly a home would do better. But anything except drowning in my thoughts. Don’t get it wrong with depression or anxiety or even grief, it’s the feeling of starting again with nothing.

“Every home must have been a house once” says everyone but I am not sure if I will ever be able to call any place home anymore. Unlike my parents, I haven’t lived most of my life, my cheeks still plump, my nails still soft, and my voice still of a girl. I can still be broken down, blended, and mended in all the places I visit. Parts of each place are interspersed into my skin delineating my immigrant journey, as if renovating my roots along with my sense of belonging. So if it’s supposed to become my home then why do I feel so uprooted?

Then a friend said it, ‘ Maybe it isn’t?’. I think so too. A change is what it is. A change that people crave yet I may never have a dearth of, with the nature of my immigrant life. Changes that will always alter the course of what I may acquire and will be. But then is my life too disturbing to ever have a home? People have homes on boats, cars and vans, what about me? Or will my life just move through places with no place to settle and collect it? I think that is exactly what it will be, too free of a life to fit in. I will move and move till the day I find comfort in remaining, which will never be. Since I am already there, I remain at peace with myself and my ever-rewarding journeys. I may never have a home but I will have the curse – the fortunate curse of an immigrant child of never belonging to a place or a house, but the journey I cover throughout. A curse that allows me to never fit in one place yet so many places at one time. A curse that may follow all my whereabouts but not me.

Copyright © 2024 Avni Batra